Cross application tracing

A distributed tracing feature is now available. Distributed tracing improves on cross application tracing and is recommended for monitoring activity in complex distributed systems.

Cross application tracing is supported by the Python agent through built in instrumentation and through the use of APIs for custom instrumentation.

The protocol used to communicate between applications involves attaching metadata to requests and responses. The metadata is processed by each application and the resulting data is reported to New Relic.

Custom client (non-HTTP)

These APIs are used to instrument libraries that do not use the HTTP transport (and therefore may not be able to use headers as a metadata transport) and are not instrumented as part of the built in instrumentation.